Today's commercial auto-stereoscopic displays typically use a lenticular, also known as a lenticular screen, in front of an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) flat panel display to create up to nine viewing zones. This low number makes it difficult to find the right position, and stay in the position, to be able to see the stereo image. The number of available pixels and their relative large size make creating more viewing zones result in an undesirable low resolution three-dimensional (3D) image. Commercial available displays come in standard formats such as the HDTV (High Definition Television) format having 1920×1080 pixels and creating an 3D image with 24 views would result in a 3D image with 1920/24=80 pixels×1080 pixels. It would be desirable to have a display with 1920×4=7680 pixels×1080/4=270 pixels. Such a display with a lenticular attached to it would have 24 pixels behind each lens and create a 320×270 pixel 3D image with 24 viewing zones.
One known solution uses an array of image projectors that project onto one lenticular screen, which creates many more viewing zones, and therefore makes it much easier for people to find the right position to receive a stereo image and at a much-higher 3D resolution. Using an array of projectors with a projection screen at some distance is no longer a compact system and could be better defined as being an installation. Such an installation is difficult to setup and there are many details such as optical distortions to take care of in order to obtain a good-quality 3D image.
The use of a lenticular screen to create the viewing zones has become very popular but its large thermal coefficient of expansion compared to the image generating device makes the quality of the 3D image depend on the temperature. And this is more noticeable when create many viewing zones and a large auto-stereoscopic display.
Others have proposed using rigid small optical fiber tapers to join the images from an array of micro displays together to form one compact large display. These optical fiber tapers can be seen as compact optical projection devices free of optical distortions. The array of fiber tapers create one large high-resolution screen where the resolution is equal in all directions which is perfect to create so called full parallax auto-stereoscopic displays but an over kill when used in the more common horizontal parallax only auto-stereoscopic displays. These optical fiber tapers are rigid, difficult to produce in larger sizes (maximum 20 centimeters), have a limited, 1:6, ratio between input and output surface and are not flexible limiting its use to create large displays cost effectively.
Images from nine projectors using nine flexible optical fiber bundles have been used. These flexible bundles make it easy to join many projectors. The objective of nearly all optical light guiding bundles is to transmit an image undistorted from one side to the other side. This is easily done by winding a fiber onto a drum. The circular shaped bundle is then cut ones to create the input side and the output side. The configuration of the fiber on the input side and output side are then perfectly equal and can transmit an image without distortion. Joining the output ends of these nine bundles creates one small image surface with the same height as the bundles, only nine times wider.
Much larger output surfaces have been created manually with optical fibers. This is done by using relatively thick optical fibers resulting in a not-always-compact end-screen with an enlarged image less suitable to create auto-stereoscopic displays.